Because I Have Words: Surviving Postgraduate Study in the UK

I Think I Missed the Memo

I think I missed the memo that said that boys and girls are supposed to be enemies, and that girls are aliens from another planet, who are terrifying?

I keep butting up against this idea, that women are terrifying to men because they are impossible to understand or predict? I don’t get it, I really don’t.

We’re just. fucking. humans, you guys!

Magic fairy sparkle dust, just for you!

We’re not magical fairy sparkle dust! We’re not a monolithic hive mind who is interested solely in shoes, chocolate and pink. We don’t all hate men, we don’t just tolerate them so we can have ALL the BABIES, and we don’t keep them around simply to put up shelves and mow the lawn.

We’re not weak special flowers who might bruise at the slightest touch. We’re not hysterical freaks for a week a month. We’re not inherently bad at maths or ‘hard science’, and we’re not inherently vain, or at least no more so than you.

All of the rubbish stereotypes you have of us? Most are not true for most women, most of the time.

The thing that’s really been getting my goat the last few days? The Alpha Male/Beta Male PUA bull shit.

I’ve been running into a guy online who thinks that all women want an Alpha Male, and will settle for nothing less, or will only settle for a “beta” if she has kids to raise.

Fortunately, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in real life who actually subscribes to such nonsense on a daily basis. Why is it sexist nonsense? Because it exists on the premise that ‘passivity’ and ‘femininity’ are awful and inexcusable. In this mindset, the only thing worth being is Alpha. If you are not Alpha, you are screwed and women will dick on you by ignoring you for all eternity. If you try to suggest that being anything other than Alpha is perfectly acceptable and deeply appreciated you’ll be shot down for trying to emasculate teh menz.

Thing is, I just cannot get my head round this attitude as a thing that even exists.My two best mates in Junior school were boys. I was one of several girls in several different friendship groups throughout Secondary school. I was never the only girl in the group of lads who was so much part of the lads’ group that she was considered one of them. Most of the guys I was mates with in those groups understood fine that I was a girl, who was their friend and was also a potential mate. I dated a fair few of them along the way, and I was still very good friends with most of them by the time we finished Sixth Form. That pattern has continued. I get on fine with guys and have as many friends among them as I do amongst the women.

As I said at the beginning, I think I missed a memo. Apparently this isn’t common in the mainstream, where men and women can never be platonic friends? I wonder if maybe that attitude is more common in the States than in the UK? I don’t know, but it does make me mad!

I’ve heard a couple of times from A that women are really, super-duper scary, and that he doesn’t know how any man approaches any woman ever? From my perspective, it’s simple. We’re human! Treat us as such, not as some fragile yet scary flower who might explode at any minute. We’re not hard to understand. Yeah, okay, maybe we cry more often on the whole but that’s only because men have been bullied into believing that “big boys don’t cry”, in a society where the only truly acceptable feeling for a man to express is aggressive anger. But even so, we’re still human beings, not mystical black boxes. The sooner you learn that the better you’ll be able to treat us and get to know us as people, which is all we really want at the end of the day. You know, a society that treats us fairly and doesn’t stack the playing board against us from before the first throw.

Anyone else feel like they missed the memo, or got an extra large helping of it?

3 thoughts on “I Think I Missed the Memo”

I’m always baffled when people suggest they handle women and men differently. I mean, huh? Why? There is… no reason for that? I don’t have many close friends and only one of them is a guy so one could indeed think I intentionally only sought out women to be friends with but actually, well, there are only a few people in my social life I feel close and connected to and incidentally only one of them is male. Nothing more! I wonder how people with that mindset even manage their lives where they are probably all the time confronted with people of another sex (and I don’t mean in a sexual/dating context, but just… at uni, for example. If I’m having a discussion with someone about the meaning of a twelfth-century-poet’s ambiguous lines I sure as hell don’t care what’s supposedly between their legs!). I’m as uncomprehending as you.

Also, if you feel like it, you could check out what John Scalzi has to say on that topic. His blog is pretty fantastic IMO and only a month or so ago he talked briefly about the Alpha/Beta Male bullshit and came to the conclusion that he could as well be a Gamma Rabbit. He even had it made into T-Shirts, it’s super adorable!